Jack and Jean Horner

(Jack Horner 1922)
(Jean Horner 1923 to 2006)

Source: Courtesy Canberra Times

Jack Horner and his wife Jean joined the newly-formed
Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship in 1957 after attending the launch
of the Fellowship's petition campaign in the Sydney Town Hall. This
was a petition for constitutional change to empower the federal
government in Aboriginal affairs. From 1958 to 1966, Jack Horner
was the hardworking Honorary Secretary in the Fellowship, during
which time he came to understand conditions of life for New South
Wales Aboriginal people and campaigned for the repeal of the New
South Wales Aborigines Protection Act 1935. In an
interview in 1996 he recalled Alex Vesper's concern about land
which he voiced at each annual conference with passion and
persistence.

Sue: I was going to ask you about Alex Vesper. Many people
remember him speaking about land rights at that conference.

Jack: He spoke about land rights. What I wanted to say was that
during a lunchbreak, I was talking to Alex Vesper. He said to me,
'You know, I should never have - AP Elkin and the other members of
the Welfare Board came and took us off the land at Stoney Gully'.
He says, 'I should never have allowed them to do that. I was
responsible for that land'. And this was 20 years afterwards. He
was still hurt and he was still annoyed that he could not stop
those men from taking them off the land. So this was a reason for
his concern about land rights: that he'd not really acted when he
should've done.

From 1959, Jack Horner was also involved in the federal
movement. He was vice-president of the Federal Council for
Aboriginal Advancement (FCAA) in 1959 and 1960, later serving as a
secretarial consultant and, in 1969, as General Secretary. Horner
alerted delegates to the amount of Aboriginal reserve land in New
South Wales that had been revoked or leased to white farmers.
Horner believed that the strength of the Federal Council for the
Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), as
it became in 1964, lay in its alliance of blacks and whites
opposing racial discrimination, both social and legislative. Jack
emphasised the roles played by the churches in the federal movement
in Aboriginal affairs.

Can I just say a bit more about the Council? The Australian
Council of Churches joined the Federal Council just about the time
of the Referendum. Frank Engel brought the land rights issue to
1964 and he was the first one to take it on. And at the 1967
Referendum I went round to the Australian Council of Churches. They
gave me a complete list of all the heads of churches with their
addresses. And I wrote to all of them. And because they had to take
part in it - you see it was a referendum - everybody had to take
part. So all the churches had to understand what it was all about.
And this meant that - I think - for the first time churches like
the Russian and Greek Orthodox - people like that - were coming to
Aboriginal affairs for the very first time and they didn't know
anything about it before. And so after that they took a more formal
interest. And they were very positive after that. We'd be able to
get from them, help in helping the Aboriginal people at Gove get
their land rights there. They formed a Methodist Aboriginal
Committee in Melbourne which helped the people in Gove.

In 1969, at a time of change and instability, Horner was the
secretary of FCAATSI. When the organisation came to debate the role
of non-Indigenous members at the 1970s conference he held firmly to
the view of FCAATSI as a multi-racial alliance. He believed that
the continuation of Indigenous and non-Indigenous people working
together was the best model for achieving political goals.

Jean Horner was for many years the treasurer of both the
Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship and FCAATSI. She successfully
sought donations to sponsor Aboriginal and Islander representatives
to travel to Canberra for annual FCAATSI meetings. Jean Horner's
skills as a treasurer were noticed during her time in that position
in the Aboriginal-Australian Fellowship. When the call for a
treasurer for the Federal Council for Aboriginal Advancement went
out in 1961, Jean was nominated. She accepted and held the position
for nine years. She played a crucial role in the development of
FCAATSI as a financially independent body at a critical time when
money was needed to sponsor Aboriginal and Islander
representativers to travel to Canberra for annual FCAATSI meetings.
Jean Horner died in 2006.

In an interview in 1996 she spoke about the people who made the
greatest impression on her. These were not the articulate public
figures. Rather they were people who, for the first time perhaps,
were coming to realise that they were not alone in their struggles
for justice.

I remember one conference in Canberra where we had Jean Jimmy
from Mapoon, and a man whose name I can't think of who came from
Carnarvon. And, oh the thing that the Aboriginal people picked up
was hearing the stories from all over. I remember this old man from
Carnarvon. He got up and said, after what we used to call the
grievance session - you know, everybody would get up and talk about
conditions on their reserves or problems they were having with the
police or whatever. This old man stood up and he said, 'I've been
listening to these accounts of problems of my brothers around
Australia and we thought we were the only people who had problems,
that the problems were ours and we had to fight them, and now I've
discovered that other people have the same problems'. You know that
was the sort of things that I remember from conferences, rather
than the speeches of Nugget Combs or Dexter or somebody official,
the official speakers or even Joe McGinness or whatever.

Source: The extracts on this page are from
interviews with Jack and Jean Horner conducted by Sue Taffe on 5
December 1996